Posted live from Greenbuild.

Yesterday, the president of Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Don McLean, stopped by our booth at Greenbuild to run through the features of his company's Virtual Environment energy and carbon footprint simulation tool for SketchUp and Revit. The new version of the software already works with the new features in SketchUp 7.

While this was going on, an attendee whose office uses SketchUp for preliminary design and Revit for the hard stuff (an increasingly common configuration) happened by, and was surprised to find out the depth of information this software pulls out of SketchUp models. It's pretty amazing. There's the free version, which has limited capabilities, and purchasable modules for energy, lighting & daylighting, solar, value & cost, egress, mechanical, and more — or the whole schmear is available in a suite.

Today Don and I had an unscheduled quick bite of lunch together up in the food court. Faced with the prospect of trying to explain his product here, I asked him to do it for me — using as few words as possible while providing the most meaning. He spoke extemporaneously while I scribbled: "It enables SketchUp users to incorporate more of their model in more effective ways into the analysis process."

And then we talked about Greenbuild over the years, the rising trend of greenwash, the increasing difficulties that professionals new to green have in cutting through the crap, and European sitcoms.

UPDATE: Check out the following from the Google SketchUp blog — if you're here in Boston, or know somebody who is, this could be a sweet thing:

Guess who's going to Greenbuild 2008?

Well, not us, but our friends at IES are! We wanted to let you know because they are offering Google SketchUp Pro customers a discount on their new Architectural Suite and Architectural Suite Plus software. Here's the deal: If you go to the Greenbuild Expo in Boston next week, visit the IES Booth (#1447) and you'll receive $250 off their software using the promo code GB08. This offer is also available on their website. If you're going to the conference to learn about building green, you may as well save some green while you're there.

Last Friday a few of us gathered around a phone behind the closed doors of one of the conference rooms here at BuildingGreen and had a chat with John Bacus from Google's team of SketchUp developers, and Aaron Stein, one of their PR folks. The supersecret talk was about the next release of that program — SketchUp 7 — which within the last couple hours has gone public.

They described it as a major upgrade, 18 months in the making, that improves the core usability and basic capability of the modeler. "Subtle but important" was a phrase that popped up... it may have been an understatement.

Some of the improvements are only available in the Pro version, but here's a quick rundown of the ones that made me sit up:

Read more...

Over the last few months I have been working with a group of people from Greensburg GreenTown and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to create case studies of new buildings in Greensburg, Kansas. We recently launched the website at greensburg.buildinggreen.com with an initial offering of 6 buildings.

The Greensburg case study website is a little different than the others that we manage for a couple reasons: many of these are unfinished projects, and the case studies are constantly evolving (as opposed to updated semi-regularly). Additionally, I am really excited that we integrated Google Maps and Google Earth for a whole new way to navigate the projects. So far only two of the buildings show up on the maps because the addresses of some buildings have not been released. For those using Google Earth, I recommend downloading the KML layer of before and after images of the town.

We hope that you find this website useful and informative. Don't forget to check out the Greensburg GreenTown website to learn more about the town and work that is going on, and if you are involved in a project there, please consider submitting a case study.

A beta version of the Energy Design Plugin for Google SketchUp has been released by the Department of Energy.

From the Energy Design Plugin website: Designed to integrate seamlessly with the SketchUp environment, the plugin allows you to use the standard SketchUp tools to create and edit EnergyPlus zones and surfaces. You can explore your EnergyPlus input files by using all of the native SketchUp 3D capabilities to view the geometry from any vantage point, apply different rendering styles, and perform accurate shadowing studies. The plugin allows you to mix EnergyPlus simulation content with decorative content such as background images, landscaping, people, and architectural finish details--all within the same SketchUp model.

I saw an almost-working version of the plugin at Greenbuild in Chicago while meeting with a DOE colleague, but a spotty Internet connection and some remaining bugs (that I'm guessing they've mostly worked out) kept me from getting the first-hand tutorial. Unfortunately, I'm on a Mac and the plugin is only working on Windows so far, so I will either have to wait until I can install Windows on my machine or it is released for Mac.

For more information and to download the plugin for free, go to: http://www.energyplus.gov/energy_design_plugin.cfm

And for more on building information modeling, see the Environmental Building News article Building Information Modeling and Green Design.